In this episode, Ellen Hendriksen discusses the hidden costs of perfectionism and why you never feel good enough. She shares the various ways perfectionism disguises itself as a positive trait—when in reality, it can lead to self-criticism, procrastination, and emotional exhaustion. Ellen also explains why perfectionism is less about being perfect and more about never feeling good enough, how self-acceptance is the antidote, and why procrastination is actually an emotional regulation problem (not a time management issue).
Key Takeaways:
- (01:02) – Perfectionism isn’t about being perfect—it’s about never feeling good enough
- (03:26) – The two wolves of perfectionism: Conscientiousness vs. Self-Criticism
- (07:36) – Overevaluation: When self-worth gets tangled with performance
- (16:57) – Guided Drift: Mr. Rogers’ surprising philosophy on perfection and mistakes
- (26:51) – The power of self-compassion: You don’t need to be perfect to be worthy
- (39:40) – Emotional Perfectionism: The toxic belief that you “shouldn’t” feel a certain way
- (43:59) – Why procrastination is actually about emotion management—not time management
- (50:46) – How to release past mistakes and stop ruminating over failures
Connect with Ellen Hendriksen Website | Instagram | LinkedIn
ELLEN HENDRIKSEN is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. She is the author of How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC News, New York Magazine, The Guardian, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, and Psychology Today, among others.
If you enjoyed this episode with Ellen Hendriksen, check out these other episodes:
How to Overcome Perfectionism and Create Your Best Work with David Kadavy
How to Manage Social Anxiety and The Inner Critic with Ellen Hendriksen
Being a Procrastinator with Tim Pychyl
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Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer 01:02
for perfectionism isn’t about being perfect. It’s about never feeling good enough. And I think that’s a really important distinction. And here’s another tricky part, it often disguises itself as something positive, like being hard working, detail oriented or driven, but when conscientiousness, which is a good quality that many of us have, tips into self criticism. When our striving turns into self doubt, that’s when it becomes a problem, and that’s why I was excited to talk with Ellen Hendrickson, clinical psychologist and author of How to be enough. She unpacks the sneaky ways perfectionism shows up in our lives, whether it’s turning fun into a chore, a classic of mine over evaluating everything or setting impossible standards. We also dive into how perfectionists handle mistakes. Some like Mr. Rogers embrace them with grace, while others, like Walt Disney obsess over every tiny flaw. And we explore why procrastination isn’t only about time management, it’s also about emotion management. If you’ve ever felt like you’re falling behind, not doing enough, or just not enough, stick around. This episode is for you. I’m Eric Zimmer, and it’s time to feed our good wolves. Hi, Ellen. Welcome back to the show
Ellen Hendriksen 02:18
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be back. It has been,
Eric Zimmer 02:21
I don’t know what we say six or seven a long time, but I remember your interview well, and we’ve re released it in the interim, because it was on a topic that a lot of people identify with, which is social anxiety. And now you’re back with a new book, which is another topic that I think a lot of people can identify with, which is perfectionism. The book is called How to be enough self acceptance for self critics and perfectionists, and we’ll talk about that in a second. But before we do let’s start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with her grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah.
Ellen Hendriksen 03:26
So I was struck by the fact that in the parable, both of the wolves are wolves that they look similar, but they’re so fundamentally different. And something that I’ve learned through researching and writing this book is that perfectionism can be good, but can very easily tip over into something really maladaptive and problematic, but it often looks the same on the surface. So helpful, perfectionism has at its heart a personality trait called conscientiousness, which is the tendency to do things well and thoroughly, to be responsible, to be dutiful, to care deeply. It’s all these, you know, wonderful things. I call it the least sexy superpower. But you know, as far as, as far as a personality trait like it’s certainly the one to choose for both objective and subjective success in life, but it can very quickly tip over into maladaptive perfectionism, and there we end up with two pillars. One is self criticism, and that, I think needs no definition. But you know, in maladaptive perfectionism is particularly harsh and personalistic. And then the other pillar is something that you know, even as a clinical psychologist, it was a term that was new to me, and that’s over evaluation, and we can talk more about that, but essentially, that is when we start to conflate our worth with our performance, when we are what we do. And so there, you know, forgive my grammar, but it’s when I did good equals, I am good, or I did bad equals, I am bad, you know, really similar fundamentals, but really different outcomes.
Eric Zimmer 05:12
Yeah, I love a couple things that you said there. The first is this idea that it looks similar but is actually different. And I think that’s an important point. And conscientiousness is a great personality trait. It seems to be one that I am particularly high in, at least later in my life. And yet, as you say, it can go too far. And I think that’s what’s interesting about nearly any trait that we have, is there is a case where there’s too little of it, or there’s too much of it, and those are problematic, right? Too little conscientiousness is no good, right? You don’t care about what you’re doing. You just aren’t paying attention, or you just let everything go. Too much of it, and it cripples you. And so what we’re looking for is somewhere in between, and I think that’s one of the things the book does a nice job of pointing out, is that these traits towards perfectionism aren’t necessarily bad, it’s that how we use them and what proportion we keep them in, and I always think that’s a helpful perspective to take, because when we think that there’s something wrong with us, or the way we are is wrong, then that’s a different message than the way we are is fine, we just might need to turn the knob down a couple notches on it from time to time.
Ellen Hendriksen 06:28
I think you’ve hit on a really important point that yes, on many of these things, we can change things. We can turn the knob down, or maybe on other things, we might want to turn the knob another way, or turn a different knob. But yes, there can be some change, and there can also be some acceptance, where we just make room for the trait that we think is, you know, not helpful or problematic, but in fact, might be just something that almost everybody struggles with, or something that is just how we’re wired. So yes, absolutely, we can change. And also we can accept, not like in a resigned way, but truly accept like, Oh, this is just part of who I am, or I come by this honestly, you know. And we can certainly talk more about that, especially as applied to self criticism later.
Eric Zimmer 07:14
Yep, the one other thing that you say early on is we’re sort of trying to set up what perfectionism is. You talked about this sort of hyper critical self relationship and this over identification with meeting standards, but you say perfectionism isn’t about striving for perfection, but about never feeling good enough? Say a little bit more about that?
Ellen Hendriksen 07:36
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m a clinical psychologist at a anxiety specialty center, and I would say the majority, almost the vast majority, of clients who come in with anxiety or depression have perfectionism at the heart of the overlapping center of the Venn diagram of their challenges. But nobody says, Hey, Ellen, I’m a perfectionist. I need help with perfectionism. Everybody comes in instead and says some variation on I’m not good enough. I feel like I’m falling behind. I should be farther ahead in life. At this point, I feel like I’m always failing. I have a million things on my plate, and I’m not doing any of them well. So there’s never a sense of striving for perfection. It’s always a sense of not measuring up, of not being enough.
Eric Zimmer 08:34
Let’s move on. You have a chapter that talks about the many salads of perfectionism. What do you mean there?
Ellen Hendriksen 08:40
Yeah. So like you said before, my last book was on social anxiety, and I think that book was easier, is not the right word to use, but it was different to write, because I think there are, I don’t know, maybe, like, four or five different sort of phenotypes of social anxiety and with perfectionism, though it’s so heterogeneous that you can line up 100 people with perfectionism, and I will show you 100 different ways of being perfectionistic. It really comes out in so many ways, because getting back to that pillar of over evaluation, we can over evaluate anything like our performance. Could be like, for example, like the striver student who derives their value from their grades. It could be an employee who sees their quarterly evaluation like as a referendum, not only on their work, but on like their character. It could be the athlete who only feels as good as their last game, the musician who only feels as good as their last performance. We can over evaluate our social behavior. Hence, you know, perfectionism being the heart of social anxiety, so we could over identify with Did I say something weird at that party? Was I awkward? We can over evaluate our reflection in the mirror, the number on the scale, anything. And so I think when I talk about the many salads of perfectionism, it gets to the heart of how. Whatever we again over evaluate and wherever we think we have to perform as superbly as possible to be sufficient as a person.
Eric Zimmer 10:09
First thing is, I would not have identified myself as someone who is a perfectionist, and I don’t know that I would after reading this book, but I saw a lot of myself in it in different places and in different ways. And I’d like to talk a little bit more about the domains of perfectionism, but let’s stay with this term over evaluation for a second. It’s a great term. It also implies that there’s a point where evaluation is good, and then there’s a point where evaluation becomes over evaluation, which seems like it might be a difficult thing to discern. So how do we go about telling when evaluation is positive? So for example, if you and I got off this call, and I went back and I looked at it and I thought, well, I could have said this there, and maybe I could have done that. And boy, the lighting. We could have changed the lighting a little bit. It might have looked a little bit better, right? Useful, but there’s a point where that would become un useful, and maybe as a way of talking about over evaluation, you can take us back to the analogy used to open the book between two famous entertainment people.
Ellen Hendriksen 11:17
Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. Of course there’s going to be some overlap. I talk a lot in Venn diagrams, don’t I, so some overlap in that Venn Diagram of, you know, our ourselves and our performance. Of course we’re going to be proud of, you know, our accomplishments. Of course we’re going to be bummed if something we did didn’t work out. That makes sense. We’re not going to completely separate those two circles, but I think when they’re almost completely congruent, like when they’re almost completely overlapping, yeah, that absolutely gets us into trouble, because then there is no room for mistakes. There’s no room for we can talk about this too the typical advice around perfectionism, which is, you know, you can just stop when things are good enough. If we feel like we are our work, we’re not gonna settle for subpar or mediocre outcomes, because then we’re subpar or mediocre. So what we can do to try to separate that is to try to focus on the work for the work’s sake. And okay, I’m gonna give you a very long answer, because I’ll tell you a story, and then I’ll get into your question about, okay, Walt Disney and Mr. Rogers. Okay, but first, let’s talk about Kareem Abdul Jabbar and John Wooden. So there, John Wooden was the legendary coach of UCLA basketball for many, many years, and when Kareem Abdul Jabbar was there, the team just had the spectacular record, and to the point where two researchers, doctors Roland Thorpe and Ronald Gallimore, decided to sit in the stands for every practice of the season to find out, like, what is the secret sauce? Like? How does Coach Wooden do this? And what they found is that He very seldom praised or rebuked his players. Instead, he would basically tell them what to do. As a former high school teacher, he would do that he would teach, and so he would say things like pass from the chest or take lots of shots where you might get them in games, run, don’t walk, pass the ball to someone short, and it was all about the information as opposed to the evaluation, that it was about the task, not the player. And so what Coach Wooden had, I think, stumbled upon was that when you focus on the work for the work sake, when you make it about information, not evaluation, when you don’t make it personal about you, ironically, that’s when the best work gets done. So there, I think that’s that’s one way to kind of separate out that over evaluation and simply get back to evaluation, like, let’s, let’s look at this work, see what is good for the work. Okay, then I will get into Walt Disney and Mr. Rogers. So there, this is a nice parallel to the opening parable with the two wolves because they look the same on the surface. So both Walt Disney and Mr. Rogers creations are beloved immortal, and they had really similar personalities. Actually, they both had really high standards. Were pretty intense. Guys had really driving work ethics focused on the details, but they really lived those traits and values really differently. And so, for example, let’s take how they focused on mistakes, because I think that gets into the overvaluation. If you are your work, there’s no room for mistakes, right? So in the book, I tell the story of Mr. Rogers at the beginning of his show, he does his signature of changing out of his blazer and his dress shoes to a cardigan and sneakers, and as he’s buttoning up the cardigan, he realizes that the buttons are one hole off, and the crew, knowing his standards, totally expected him to call cut and. To re film. But instead, on camera, he just ad libbed re button the sweater and made a remark about how Mistakes happen and moreover, they can be corrected. So he folded mistakes into his high standards. And so by contrast, I also tell the story of Walt Disney’s micromanagement of the making of Snow White. So there he just can’t bring himself to trust this world class team of animators that he had so carefully hired. And he makes them redo just tiny details, like the Queen’s eyebrows are too extreme, grumpy finger is too big. Have the hummingbird make four pickups instead of six. And at the premiere, he tells a reporter, you know, all I can see is the flaws. I wish we could just yank it back and do this all over again. So instead of kind of flexibly folding mistakes into the process, Walt Disney just rigidly tried to avoid mistakes. So because, again, if you are your work, of course, you’re not going to make any room for error or belief that they can be corrected.
Eric Zimmer 16:05
And you talk about, in Mr. Rogers case, he uses something called Guided drift. Say a little bit more about what that is.
Ellen Hendriksen 16:12
Yeah, I love that concept. So Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and he studied at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and his mentor there, William Orr, instilled in him this principle so guided drift. So if you can imagine, sort of like logs floating down a river, the logs can go wherever the current takes them, but they are bound by the banks of the river. And so the analogy, or the metaphor, is that you know stay true to your principles. You know stay true to your integrity, but be flexible within that. Be open to the serendipity of life. Be open to where the current you know takes you within the confines of your own values.
Eric Zimmer 16:57
I love that idea, and I’m going to apply it in a very different way for a second. But I talk about this with coaching clients and people I’m trying to teach to make change in their life, is that you have to do two things sort of simultaneously. One is you have to be sort of rigid about the fact, like I’m committed to this. I’m going to find a way to do it, but then you have to be extraordinarily flexible in how you do it. And I love that idea of guided drift, because in this case, the river banks are moving my body on a regular basis. Is important to my mental and emotional health. That’s the bank. But how I might move my body, how much each day, how I might need to be flexible. That’s the drift within that river. And when you try and make it only one way, the logs can get stopped and get blocked. They need to be able to go around obstacles.
Ellen Hendriksen 17:52
Absolutely.We can think about that in so many ways, like we can think about, I don’t know, like a social engagement. So like is the point to sort of rigidly perform, you know, telling funny stories for our friends and to get approval, or is the point to connect. And, like, there’s so many different ways we can connect. We don’t have to, you know, just tell the same funny stories, or to, yeah, perform in a certain way. So, yeah, you can apply this to almost any domain of life, which, as we’re talking about flexibility, is sort of an appropriate example.
Eric Zimmer 18:25
Let’s talk about the seven domains of perfectionism for a second, because I think this is useful for us to get a sense of the different places and ways this can show up for us. So we talked about one of them, the hyper critical self relationship. We talked about the over evaluation. Tell me about the next one that’s on this list, which is orientation to rules.
Ellen Hendriksen 18:50
For sure. Yeah. So those of us with perfectionism orient to rules. We want to know the rules so we can follow them. And ironically, if there are no rules, we will often set up personally demanding rules. We’ll make them up, and then we’ll follow those. So think about, you know, making up rules for healthy eating, or making up rules like we were just talking about exercise, making up rules for how we’re going to move our body. So rules are not necessarily bad, you know, we should pay our taxes, you know, etc, but it’s when the rules become rigid. So we apply them no matter the situation, like we try to follow our Healthy Eating rules, even on Halloween or two, they’re all or nothing. So with that over evaluation, if we follow the rules acceptably, we are acceptable, so but if we mess up, if we slip up, we break the rule, bend the rule in even the slightest way, it renders us unacceptable. So in our Healthy Eating example, I ate a cookie. So I’m bad. I was bad today. And then the third way rules can get in our way in perfectionism is when we impose our rules on a. There are people and that can get in the way of our relationships. So the classic example I hear from couples, both in the office and just in my life and honestly in my own house, is how to load the dishwasher correctly. Like, what is the right way to load that dishwasher?
Eric Zimmer 20:16
Yeah, this is amazing, that this is such a thing. I mean, my partner and I have it now, we have decided that it is utterly irrelevant, and so there’s no point in caring. But yet, I mean, I open the dishwasher and I think, why did she load it that way?
Ellen Hendriksen 20:31
For sure? No, yeah. And like my partner and I have figured out if, okay, if you’re loading the dishwasher, then you do it your way, like this. It’s your task. You do it however you want. But you know, there are many households where that isn’t the case. I had a client who was trusting enough to admit that she was controlling how her husband made mac and cheese for their kids. She’s like, you can’t just dump the pasta back in after you drain it and then put in the cheese and the butter. You gotta keep the pasta in the colander, and then, you know, put in the butter and the cheese and make that the sauce, and then put in the pasta. And so I’m not saying this to throw hard to the bus. I’m saying this to be validating that this is what happens in households, you know, across America, and that it’s sort of the classic, you know, would we rather be right, or would we rather get along? And, you know, there’s not a perfect answer. Sometimes it is better to be right, sometimes it is better to get along. But anyway, I’m saying this to be relatable and and validating that rules loom large in the minds of people with perfectionism.
Eric Zimmer 21:27
Yeah, the problem with the dishwasher thing, like letting you do your thing, is that I’m going to come in after you and need to put dishes in during the day, and it’s going to be all jacked up at that point. And you know what kind of moron loads it? No, I’m just kidding.
Speaker 1 21:40
Do you have a camera in my house? It sounds familiar. Yeah, right.
Eric Zimmer 21:44
It just cracks me up, that like this is such a common thing and that we actually care. When you look at it from that perspective, how trivial a matter, you know, what could be a more trivial matter than that, really, and yet, we’re going to cause tension and discomfort and problems in our most important relationship. It’s just like you. I’m not singling people out. I’m just saying looking at it from a certain angle, you’re like, This is insane. This also brings up a point that I think is important about perfectionism, which is that we apply it to ourselves, for sure, but we also apply it to other people, and you were sort of talking about that, so maybe we can put a pin in that, and we’ll come back around to it, because I want to stay within the domains here. The next domain is focusing on mistakes. Let’s talk about that.
Ellen Hendriksen 22:31
Sure.Yeah. So as we alluded to a little bit before, let’s tie it together with the over evaluation. If we think we’re not doing something correctly, then that renders us incorrect, however. So I think I make a distinction with over evaluation, between lowering your standards or stopping when things are good enough. I don’t think we have to do that actually, plus that doesn’t go over well and making room for mistakes. Those might sound like the same thing, but I think they’re really different. For example, okay, I’ll tell you a story. So I had a client who was a pediatrician, and she had been a pediatrician for 25 years, was by her report, as far as I could tell, very good at it. Had risen in the ranks in her clinic, but she came in and in the last week, had made a mistake, that she had misdiagnosed a little girl who came in with what turned out to be appendicitis. She was okay. Ended up having to go the emergency room, but was okay. She misdiagnosed that as constipation, and had sent the family home and just came into session just lambasting herself, saying, Oh, I’m a terrible doctor. I should retire early. Maybe I should get my brain examined. Something’s wrong with me, and I think it would be inappropriate to tell her to lower her standards. Like, of course, you’re not gonna say, Ah, I did well enough today, taking care of people’s lives whatever you know. No, we’re not gonna do that. But mistakes are inevitable, especially over 25 years of practice. And so I asked her, Okay, if you had a colleague who had been in practice for 25 years, what percentage of diagnoses would you expect to be like? A reasonable number of missed diagnoses? The answer can’t be zero, but even 1% gives you way more wiggle room than 0% yes, and so making room for the inevitable mistakes, because we’re human and that’s sort of the package deal of being alive and doing any kind of work is really different than lowering your standards.
Eric Zimmer 24:59
I think that’s. Really good distinction. It takes me back to rules for a second, because I do find at times that making rules for myself is really helpful. It guides me. One of my goals is to move my body for 30 minutes every day. Doesn’t matter how, but just somehow, that’s my standard. That’s my rule. However, my belief is that 80 to 90% success at that is good enough. Because what that means is, you know, if I move my body in that way, 90% of the days, but I’m able to do that week after week, month after month, year after year, that little bit that I’m not doing comes out in the wash. It just doesn’t matter. However, if I expect that I have to do 100% when I don’t, I get discouraged. And one of the things we do know about motivation is it tends to go up when we feel good about ourselves and when we feel like we’re capable, and it tends to go down when we feel like we’re not good or we’re not capable of doing it. So this idea of like rules can be useful, but they’ve got to have some degree of flexibility and adaptability to the I love the word you just use the inevitable things that are going to come up right? It’s inevitable a doctor practicing long enough is going to misdiagnose someone. It’s inevitable if you’re trying to eat right, that there are going to be times that you don’t. It’s inevitable. If you’re trying to exercise really regularly, they’re going to be days or even periods where you don’t. Those things are inevitable. And the question becomes, how do I respond wisely when the inevitable happens? And this is where I see so many people get lost on their attempts to make change in their life, and it’s a perfectionist thing. It’s like, either I’m doing it all or I’m doing it none, and what you’re arguing for is this place in between there?
Ellen Hendriksen 26:51
Yeah, absolutely. So I think you’re tapping into some self compassion, yeah, when we inevitably make a mistake, screw up, you know, like if we don’t exercise, even though that’s really important to us because we’re exhausted or injured or just don’t have time that day, or it’s six degrees outside, yeah? Then I think, okay, here, let me back up. All right? Self Compassion, according to the researcher, Dr Kristin Neff, consists of three things, so there’s self kindness, non judgmental mindfulness, and connection to the larger human experience, but the perfectionistic brain does none of those things. So we’re wired to be self critical instead of kind to ourselves. We’re wired to be a little bit judgmental. We zero in on flaws and details, instead of being non judgmentally mindful, and instead of like our inevitable shortcomings, connecting us to the larger human experience, we see, you know, our struggles or our mistakes or that, we focus on that that missed 10% as a shortcoming that sets us apart as inadequate, rather than a common experience that connects us to everybody else. So in the same, you know, vein as Dr Neff. So when I was learning to be a therapist, I was taught that self compassion was talking to yourself like a good friend, but my perfectionistic brain thought that that meant that I needed to generate this, like steady stream of articulate and effective self compassionate hype, and that was just way too high a bar. So yeah, over the years, I have learned that self compassion, you know, absolutely can be words, but it can be one word, it can be like, easy or a couple words, you’re okay. But even more than that, self compassion can be actions. So it could be in our exercise example, going to the gym because we know from experience that that’s going to make us feel better. But it could also be allowing ourselves to skip the gym, allowing ourselves a day off from exercise, because what we really need is an extra hour of sleep, or because it’s six degrees outside, right? And so self compassion is turning towards our pain and suffering and asking, What do I need with care and understanding? And that can be not doing all that we expect of ourselves. So kind of the old version of my perfectionistic brain would have seen 90% as like, come on, where’s that extra 10% I did that before. Why can’t I do this again? Whereas I’d say, now again, I wrote this book for me. I’ll see it as of course, this is 90% like everybody does, 90% this is how it works, that there are going to be exceptions and days where I don’t hit it out of the park. But that doesn’t mean that I have struck out.
Eric Zimmer 29:38
right? And that section in the book has one of the funniest lines in the book, one of the things Kristen Neff suggests is Laying a hand kindly upon your heart, telling yourself this is hard, you know, and you’re like, I’m right there with you. I may lay a hand kindly upon my heart and tell myself this is hard, but self criticism will ride up behind me in a hockey mask and yell in my ear, no, it’s fucking not.
Ellen Hendriksen 30:01
It’s., Yeah, this is a documentary, yeah?
Eric Zimmer 30:04
So I love that idea, though, because I do think that we often set the bar for self compassion too high. And I like what you said there, because it can just be a word or two, but it often is in what we don’t say to ourselves, right? Self Compassion often manifests in I don’t have to say lovely things to myself, but can I not say the shitty things to myself? Like that is self compassion sometimes, and I often talk about how when I’m in a negative mood space, I can’t often get to positive. Can I aim for neutral? Yeah, right. Can I aim for just not so negative, like, because I just think that’s a much easier bar. And I also think that with all of this stuff, however we talk to ourselves at our head, we have to believe it to some degree. So saying, Oh, I’m amazing, I’m wonderful, and we don’t feel that often just backfires,
Ellen Hendriksen 31:01
yeah? Because there’s part of you, all of us, inside this. That’s a lie, you know what? Yeah. Now, what are you talking about? Yeah? For sure, exactly.
Eric Zimmer 31:09
Yeah. The other thing, back to the rules for a second, and self compassion. But I think there’s another thing here that we’ve sort of gone around a little bit, and you sort of alluded to with this 90% or 80% success rate. Part of that is self compassion, but part of that is also just an understanding of reality. And I think that’s important when it comes to perfectionism, is understanding reality. Mistakes are inevitable, all these things, and so if we can have a more realistic expectation to start with. We need self compassion even less, right? Because we won’t see the day that we didn’t move our body for whatever reason. We won’t see it as a mistake that we then have to say, Oh, I’m going to extend self compassion to myself because I made it’s just simply like, well, of course that happened. Of course it was gonna happen sooner or later. So today happened to be the day.
Ellen Hendriksen 32:03
Yeah no. I mean, mistakes are only a problem if we think they shouldn’t be happening, right? Like, okay, so here I’ll tell you a personal story. This happened just last week, actually. So for the first time in 12 years, I double booked a patient, and then, just like, did my other meeting and left her hanging on Zoom, like, I completely missed this visit. And again, it hadn’t happened in 12 years. I felt horrible when I realized it happened, and I, you know, immediately apologized and did what I could to make it right. She was understanding. And she’s like, Oh, I thought you had an emergency. Like, I just kind of rolled with it. So thank God she was understanding about it. But I again, I felt terrible that I had left this person whose mental health care I am in charge of hanging it was terrible, and I tried to make room for it. And thought like, well, you know, over 20 years of clinical practice, if this happens once a decade, that’s about, right? You know, like, that is kind of how it works, yeah. So this is my quota, and this is how it goes. And I don’t say that to excuse it, or to say it’s okay, but I do say that to make room for like, yeah, of course this is gonna happen. And you were talking about self criticism and trying to, you know, not say that, you know, the really horrible, shitty things to ourself. And I agree with you that, yes, that’s the change lever we can pull, we can try to be kinder to ourselves, to be, if not like, validating or understanding, then, you know, at least neutral. And we can also pull that acceptance lever of maybe my brain just says shitty things to me, yes, but I don’t have to listen to it and like that for me, you know, I have just, I come from a long line of perfectionists, and I am just wired to be a little more self critical than the average bear. And so through experience, I have learned that whenever I do anything involving a microphone, that when I log off, my brain’s just gonna start going be like, Why did you say it that way? Like, or, oh my gosh, you said way too many personal things or, you know, no one’s gonna resonate with my brain’s just gonna start going and I’ve found that it’s just part of the script that, like, when you go to a restaurant, there’s a script like, you sit down, you look the menu, you order, your food comes, you eat, you pay, you leave. In my self critical world, you know, I send something out into the world, and my brain criticizes it and myself, and then we move on, and either it’s fine, or I learn from it, if for whatever reason, I didn’t fulfill my intention or whatnot, you know, that’s okay. So I’ve learned to sort of take this dance towards my own self critical brain, like I listen to the music at a coffee shop, like it’s there, you know, I can hear it, but I don’t have to get yanked around by it. I don’t like, stand on the table and, you know, dance to the beat. So, yeah, yeah, when
Eric Zimmer 34:48
you think about it, it’s amazing to me the sorts of things that will pop into my head that I recognize as, like, dominant parts of my thinking 30 years ago. But they’re not gone. They will show up. And I laugh at them, largely because I now can see just how wildly over dramatic they are, just how completely I mean, I don’t know, a small mistake gets made. My brain starts saying, I wish I was dead. And I’m like, Well, okay, settle down like that’s ridiculous. So I can kind of laugh at it now, because I recognize it’s just some sort of, like you said, some sort of script popping up in response to a particular stimulus that I don’t have to give a lot of importance to. I don’t need to be like, Oh my god, am I? Am I suicidal? Because No, of course, I’m not right. It’s just a voice that says something and learning to just accept it. And for me, like I said, laughter is really helpful, because I’m like, it’s so disproportionate to what’s actually happening. It’s what tells me that it’s like my eight year old self talking,
Ellen Hendriksen 35:56
right? For sure. Yeah, no. I think those of us with some perfectionism, like we talked about before, are conscientious, and that means we take things seriously, but that means we take our own thoughts and feelings seriously as well. And so part of my job in the clinic is to help people with perfectionism take their own thoughts and feelings a little bit less literally. That just because we think like, Oh, I wish I were dead, yeah, it doesn’t mean we’re suicidal. That could just be a thought that we can, like, let pass by us, like, sushi at a revolving restaurant. You know, we’re like, yeah. Maybe that is something that we thought a lot when we were 25 but, you know, it’s just yeah, so absolutely like, just because we think it or feel it like, just because we feel incompetent, doesn’t mean we are like, that we can’t do this thing that we want to do, or just because we feel dissatisfied with our lives doesn’t mean that we’re actually falling behind. So a mentor helped me by saying, like, yeah, take your problems seriously, but don’t take them too seriously. Like, hold your problems as if you’re holding a small animal, like a hamster or like a little bird, and so you have to hold them, you know, firmly, like you have to take it seriously, so that they don’t run away, you know, but if you hold them too tightly, you’re gonna make a big mess. So so that that hold hold your problems lightly, has been very helpful to me, and I try to pass that on to clients as well.
Eric Zimmer 37:20
So I have a question for you that I think about a lot, and this is a slight deviation, but I’m curious how you think about this, because with thoughts and emotions, there seem to be two sort of approaches in psychology that I have seen. I’m over generalizing here, but one approach is the little bit more Acceptance and Commitment Therapy type thing, a little bit more Buddhist type thing, which is your thoughts and feelings are just things that arise. You know, they come out of causes and conditions. Don’t let them run your life. Don’t pay a ton of attention. The other seems to be sort of the psychoanalytic approach, or the depth psychology approach, which says everything that you feel is a message, right? And you’ve got to pay attention to what these things are telling you. And I find that I end up needing to use both those approaches, but I often don’t know when to do, which that’s
Ellen Hendriksen 38:17
a great question. So maybe I’m coming down on one side of your question by invoking Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, where the gurus there, you know, say, essentially do what works for the context. Okay. And context can be what we kind of literally think of as context, like the situation at hand, but context can also be like our genetics, our history, like, everything that’s brought us to the present moment and like, Let’s do what works. Let’s do what’s functional for the situation, the context at hand. So weirdly, even though that’s an act concept there, maybe what works is some death psychology. Maybe what works is, yeah, some analytic stuff. So you’re right. It is hard to know what’s correct per se. But I think that brings us back to our conversation about flexibility. And, you know, we’ll try something, and if we find that that’s not what we needed, we can do something else. That’s okay. It’s not, you know, a one and done exam for, like, okay, decide right now what’s gonna work go?
Eric Zimmer 39:23
Yeah, that leads us into another domain that you talk about, of perfectionism, I think is worth talking about, which is emotional perfectionism. And this is an idea that only kind of came across my radar semi recently. Tell me what emotional perfectionism is.
Ellen Hendriksen 39:40
Yeah, it’s being appropriate in one’s felt or demonstrated emotion. So it’s essentially when we’ve learned that emotion is a response to a particular situation as opposed to how we actually feel inside. So an example. Might be that I say that customer service is entirely predicated on sort of this performative, emotional perfectionism, like Service with a smile, like the salesperson is acting how they should, or how is appropriate, as opposed to how they might really feel about the situation. So sometimes that’s appropriate, right? Like in a job interview. Of course, we’re going to act excited about the prospect of working there at a funeral. Of course, we’re going to act sad or concerned or whatnot. But if that becomes our go to if how we feel both inside and what we show on our face is determined by the situation as opposed to how we feel, then it can come off as feeling to us like empty or fake or phony, and then that, you know, over months and years and decades, can leave us sort of emotionally bereft.
Eric Zimmer 41:16
I think about emotional perfectionism, also in the sense of like, I shouldn’t feel x, right? And I think this gets us into a lot of trouble. And I think everybody has their own variation on it, right? Mine tends to be these days, something like, you’ve been talking to people about these ideas for a decade. You’ve done 800 interviews. You’ve been in recovery for 30 years. Like, why do you feel that way? Like, you know better, you can do better. And that is just a really unhelpful way of thinking. But I think everybody has their own variation of that. You know, of I should be better than this by now, or I shouldn’t respond this way, or I shouldn’t respond that way. And I think when we look at behavior, it’s really helpful to say, like, Okay, I probably shouldn’t act that way. You talked about Mr. Rogers. He has some line. I won’t get it right. But basically, everybody has all kinds of feelings, and that’s fine, right? What matters is what we end up doing with them, right?
Ellen Hendriksen 42:15
Yeah, you’re getting to the difference between feelings and behavior. So for example, so I had a client who came in for fear of public speaking so at work, his boss, in his evaluation, said, basically, you need to take more space, like we need to hear more from you in meetings. You know you need to volunteer for conferences and presentations. We need to hear you talk more. And my client had sort of this idea that not only did he have to perform well, so be articulate, or, like, have a big impact on his audience, but he also had to feel confident while he did it. And so when he inevitably, you know, felt anxious before a presentation, or kind of questioned himself before he spoke up in a meeting, was like, Oh, is this? Is this relevant? Do people really want to hear this like he had like he had done it wrong because he had deviated from that emotional perfectionism of, I need to feel confident, you know, before I speak. And so we really worked on trying to shift from like, well, feel it. And then the thing you can control is your behavior. You can’t control how you feel. If you could do that, you would have done that by now, you know. And anyone who has ever been told, you know, just relax. You know, has knows that you can’t, you can’t control how you feel, but what we can control, by and large, is our behavior. So you know, regardless of how my client felt, he could make a comment in a meeting, he could get up and, you know, introduce the next speaker. He can control his behavior, even if he feels like his organs are rearranging themselves inside him.
Eric Zimmer 43:45
Yeah, it’s a really good example. Let’s talk about something that, at first glance, doesn’t look like. It’s related to perfectionism, which is procrastination.
Ellen Hendriksen 43:59
For sure. Yeah. So procrastination, it took me a very long time to realize that procrastination is not a time management problem. That’s really it’s an emotion regulation problem. So, yeah, perfectionism absolutely drives procrastination. Aversive tasks require quite a bit of, like, self regulation, you know, like we have to focus, we have to, like, sort of figure out what we’re doing. And, you know, self regulation deteriorates under emotional distress. So therefore, you know, if we’re setting these perfectionistic standards, you know, we are setting personally demanding standards that might even be, like, too high for anyone to reach, but then we feel like we have to reach it, or else we’re inadequate. Like, of course, we’re going to feel distressed and overwhelmed. And then that is going to put mood repair front and center. In order to do the aversive task, we need to make ourselves feel better. So then procrastination. Steps in as a coping mechanism. So it’s a one two punch, because procrastination not only allows us to avoid the task that’s making us feel bad, you know, overwhelmed, incapable, inadequate, but we immediately replace it with something that makes us feel better. So like, I’m gonna scroll through social media, or like, I’m gonna deep clean my apartment and feel productive, or I’m gonna grind through my email and like, oh, this needs to get done, you know, so you can feel virtuous
Eric Zimmer 45:24
until you are on the other side of it, and now you feel worse about yourself because you procrastinated and you dread the task more than you did before. It’s this really weird thing, because the minute that you do say yes, essentially, oh, I’ll do it later, and you go do something else, there’s an immediate feeling of like, okay, that feels good, but like drugs, it wears off, and then you’re like, oh boy. I think I may have made this worse. And I think that’s so true. It’s not about time management, but emotion management. And when I talk about or work with people on procrastination, really, any kind of trying to change a behavior. I think there’s two key components. The first is what I refer to as structural meaning. Do I know what I’m going to do? Is the task broken down small enough? Do I know how to do it? Have I set up my environment so I don’t get distracted? It’s all it’s structural things, and that can often go a long way. And there is still the moment where even if I know what I’m supposed to do, even if the task is small, I’m at that moment of choice. And then you’re right, that is all about my emotion management. It’s all about what am I saying to myself, What am I feeling? And what can I say to myself that will just get me over that hump. And I think that’s why buying more and more planners, or, you know, buying a system to stop procrastination can be helpful, but it’s often only half of this problem, or sometimes it’s way less than that, and everybody’s a little bit differently. So I think always getting the structural out of the way first, because that’s the easy part. It’s easy, relatively, to figure out, like, Okay, let me take this big task, break it into little tasks, etc. It’s harder to manage your emotions in that moment, but ultimately, that is, like you said, what we have to be able to do. You also talk about something you call a procrastination parfait. Say a little bit more about what that means to you. So
Ellen Hendriksen 47:23
in perfectionistic procrastination, we layer on all these sedimentary layers of negative emotion that then we have to regulate and work through. And so it could be unrealistic standards. So you were talking about the structural issues, and I agree that that quote, unquote, should be easy, but I know, you know, sometimes if I’m not sure what the first step is, I’ll think to myself, well, I should know the first step. Why don’t I know how to do this, you know? But like, I think we can use some self compassion. We can use some, you know. Like, of course, I don’t know the first step. Like, why should I know how to update my website, you know, to get around that, okay, yeah. So, yeah, unrealistic standards
Eric Zimmer 48:02
here, I should have said, Not easy, easier perhaps, than emotion.
Ellen Hendriksen 48:06
Yes, it gets thorny, right? So there’s the unrealistic standards of like, I should know how to do this, or I should do this all in one go, or I, you know, need to do this like, so thoroughly that like to the standard that no one would ever expect of me. Yeah? So that’s one next is there could be this layer of fear of failure. So, you know, remember that, like those of us with some perfectionism, put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do things well and correctly, and so the prospect of making a mistake, you know, either in outcome or in process, you know, as a callback to our conversation about, like, Oh, I did it, but I didn’t feel confident. You know, like, if there’s any aspect of us possibly failing to meet our standards, then of course, that’s going to cause some distress. There’s procrastination related self criticism, like, maybe we’ve procrastinated already. And, you know, we, instead of doing our work, like baked a loaf of banana bread, or just scroll through Instagram for three hours, or, you know, played Baldur skate three for eight hours, you know, like that.
Ellen Hendriksen 49:15
So I have two teenage boys, so I’m plugged in. This is a very popular game. I have an acquaintance who calculated that all of 2024 she spent two weeks of, you know, like 24 hours, like the time she could have spent sleeping or awake playing Baldr skate three. So anyway, okay, so we might use that to procrastinate, and then we feel guilty like, Oh, my God, I wasted two weeks of my life playing this video game. And so now we have to regulate that guilt or self criticism. And then, of course, there is just kind of general self criticism, like when we’re procrastinating or when we feel incompetent before a task. You know, we may say, like, why am I so stupid? Stop being lazy. Why? I can’t do this. I’m so disorganized. You know, there’s just the general self criticism that then, in addition, we have to regulate all of that negative emotion. So yeah, parfait, all the way.
Eric Zimmer 50:10
Yeah, I love it. I often think about, like, upward and downward spirals. And what we’re talking about here is sort of a downward spiral. You start layering these different things on, and each one takes you down a level and a level, and then you feel bad about what you didn’t and it just circles. Let’s just talk quickly about a couple of strategies for releasing past mistakes. So if you’re somebody who does tend to amplify your past mistakes, you think about them a lot. What can we do to start letting go of some of those, one or two or both of those. So one of
Ellen Hendriksen 50:46
the things we can do, I took this from Dr Russ Harris, who’s the author of the happiness trap, and he’s a big wig in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and one of the techniques that I really like is called physicalizing. And this gets a little woo, woo. So stick with me here, but it starts with imagining, like negative emotions, like guilt or shame over mistakes as a physical object within your body. So first, like, bring your mistake to mind, and it’s likely going to be a physical experience. So maybe, like, you’ll feel the heat start to rise. Maybe you’ll feel like some pressure behind your eyes. Whatever that feeling, that physical feeling is, imagine it as an actual, like physical object. So and you can drill down on the details. So, like, think about, like, what color it is, is it transparent or opaque? Is it heavy or light? So, for example, like I had a client who regretted dropping out of school, like, thought that that was a mistake, and the object that he envisioned was this, like kind of sopping black sponge in the center of his chest. Okay, so then once you’ve got that sort of pictured, like in your mind’s eye, like placed wherever you feel it in your body, then what you want to do is to make room for it within your body so you inhale. And as you inhale, you sort of like create some space around that object. And then, like, just to continue breathing in and out and and as you breathe in, like, create that room opening up, allowing that object to be there. You’re not trying to get rid of it. You’re not trying to squeeze it out. You’re creating some space for it. And ironically, you know, this can’t be the outcome. It can’t be what we expect to happen. But what often happens is that when we make room for feeling bad, we often feel less bad, because by you know, as I said before, like mistakes are only a problem if we think they shouldn’t be happening, and so by allowing it, that feeling will often diminish. And I really like that, because it’s sort of a body based way to make room for the negative emotions of like guilt or other emotions that go along with making mistakes. So that’s been helpful both to me and clients.
Eric Zimmer 53:13
I think that’s a great technique, and I think it’s a good place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation for a little bit, talking about two things that we did not get to. One is comparing ourselves to others, which is a common theme and a real challenge. And the other is my favorite in this book, which I relate to, which is, why do we turn fun into a chore? Oh, you’re speaking my language. Yes, in the post show conversation, we’re going to cover that listeners, if you would like to become part of our community, which would allow you to get this post show conversation and all the others, as well as a special episode I do each week, and you would like to support us, because we are a small podcast that can really use your support. Go to one you feed.net/join Ellen. Thank you so much for coming on. I thought the book was excellent, and I really enjoyed this conversation.
Ellen Hendriksen 54:07
Oh, thank you so much for having me on again. It’s always a delight to talk to you.
